Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 63, August 2018, Pages 47-60
Consciousness and Cognition

Comparative psychology without consciousness

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.06.012Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Reviews evidence supporting the global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness.

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    Argues that our concept of phenomenal consciousness is all-or-none.

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    Points out that while global broadcasting is all-or-none in humans, it will admit of degrees across species.

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    Argues in the light of this that there is no fact of the matter about consciousness in nonhuman animals.

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    Argues that all of the substantive questions about animal minds can be addressed without consideration of consciousness.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to establish the truth of the following conditional: if a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is correct, and is fully reductive in nature, then we should stop asking questions about consciousness in nonhuman animals—not because those questions are too hard to answer, but because there are no substantive facts to discover. The argument in support of this conditional turns on the idea that while global broadcasting is all-or-nothing in the human mind, it is framed in terms that imply gradations across species. Yet our concept of phenomenal consciousness doesn’t permit mental states to be to some degree conscious. Before getting to that argument, however, and in order to motivate the subsequent discussion, some of the virtues of global workspace theory are displayed.

Section snippets

Initial distinctions

The kind of consciousness that forms our topic is so-called phenomenal consciousness. This is the sort of consciousness that is like something to undergo, that has a distinctive subjective feel, or that has a qualitative character. Phenomenal consciousness is a species of mental-state consciousness. It is mental states (smelling a rose, hearing a trumpet, or seeing the color of a tulip) that can be phenomenally conscious. People are phenomenally conscious derivatively, by virtue of undergoing

Motivating global workspace theory

A global workspace account of consciousness was first developed in detail by Baars, 1988, Baars, 1997, Baars, 2002, and was originally expressed in cognitive (rather than neural-network) terms. A close relative of Baars’ theory (published subsequently but independently) is Tye, 1995, Tye, 2000 PANIC theory. (PANIC stands for Poised Abstract Nonconceptual Intentional Content.) The basic idea of both approaches is that some perceptual and perception-like contents (including visual and auditory

Degrees of broadcasting across species

Dennett (2001) once defended a theory very much like the global workspace account, except that it allowed for degrees. He said that consciousness is like fame in the brain. And just as someone can be more or less famous, or can become just a little bit more famous, so a mental state can be more or less conscious, or can get just a little bit more conscious. But it seems he was mistaken. Global broadcasting in humans appears to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon. There is a step-function underlying

Phenomenal consciousness is all-or-none

In contrast to the global workspace, it seems that applications of the concept phenomenally conscious are all-or-none. Or so I shall now argue. (For a different but converging argument, see Simon, 2017.)

As many people have noted, it is hard to conceive of a case of experience that is partly like something to undergo, partly not. Put differently: it is hard to conceive of a perceptual state that is partly phenomenally conscious, partly not. Of course creature consciousness (whether intransitive

Give up on workspace theory?

We have a mismatch between our concept of phenomenal consciousness (which is all-or-nothing) and arguably our best theory of the property that the concept picks out (which admits of degrees across species). One might respond to this mismatch by rejecting the theory. One could claim that, given such a mismatch, whatever else the theory of global broadcasting is, it can’t be a theory of phenomenal consciousness.

There is no mismatch between the concept of phenomenal consciousness and global

Draw a (vague) boundary?

As we noted in Section 4, we can’t really make sense of degrees of phenomenal consciousness. But perhaps we don’t have to. An obvious suggestion is that a creature will enjoy phenomenally conscious experience if it undergoes states that are more similar to human global broadcasting than they are similar to any form of human unconscious mental state. We can set up a categorical concept that will reach beyond the human case, while staying true to the all-or-nothing first-personal nature of the

Doing without consciousness

It seems there may be a great many species of animal for whom there is no fact of the matter as to whether they have phenomenally conscious states or not. Is this something that should disturb us? And should we now try to settle which species (if any) have states that are close enough to being globally broadcast in the human manner that any reasonable precisification of the concept of global broadcasting would show them to be conscious? I think both questions should be answered negatively.

Of Martians, mice, and men

Someone might object as follows to argument outlined above. Suppose that there are Martians who are vastly more intelligent than us. Specifically, suppose that their executive function capacities outstrip ours by orders of magnitude, adding many new abilities while also greatly magnifying and expanding some of the same capacities we possess. Indeed, suppose that their cognitive abilities outstrip ours by as much as our minds outstrip the mind of a mouse. Martian philosophers might then wonder

Moral matters?

It might be said that even if the question of animal consciousness has no significance for comparative psychology, it matters greatly for the question of our ethical treatment of animals.

One way of developing this line of thought is to focus on empathy, since empathy requires first-personal identification with the feelings of the subject empathized with. To empathize with someone means imagining, in a first-person way, what that person is feeling. Since any state that we consciously imagine in

Conclusion

If the global workspace theory is correct, then it provides at least the outline of a full scientific explanation of phenomenal consciousness. For it can explain, not only the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states, but also why we should find our own conscious states to be so scientifically puzzling. This is because we can form acquaintance-based indexical concepts for them, ones that lack any conceptual connections to the underlying scientific facts. As a result, we can

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Chris Masciari, Joe Millum, Aida Roige, Eric Saidel, Julius Schönherr, and Moonyoung Song for comments on some of the ideas presented in this article, as well as to three anonymous referees for their criticisms and advice.

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